RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the Industrial Revolution
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 729913
DO 10.1101/729913
A1 Myroslava Protsiv
A1 Catherine Ley
A1 Joanna Lankester
A1 Trevor Hastie
A1 Julie Parsonnet
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/08/729913.abstract
AB In the US, the normal, oral temperature of adults is, on average, lower than the canonical 37°C established in the 19th century. We postulated that body temperature has decreased over time. Using measurements from three cohorts--the Union Army Veterans of the Civil War (N=23,710; measurement years 1860-1940), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I (N=15,301; 1971-1975), and the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (N=150,280; 2007-2017)--we determined that mean body temperature in men and women, after adjusting for age, height, weight and, in some models date and time of day, has decreased monotonically by 0.03°C per birth decade. A similar decline within the Union Army cohort as between cohorts, makes measurement error an unlikely explanation. This substantive and continuing shift in body temperature—a marker for metabolic rate—provides a framework for understanding changes in body habitus and human longevity over the last 200 years.